Monthly Archives: March 2014

A few months ago, I had blogged about some Storyline slider interactions for a technical training project. I had a bit of time on my hands and decided  to expand my ‘collection’ of slider interactions to include some more complex examples. For example, I wanted to figure out how to build a range slider that lets users select both a low and high-range value. That sounds easy enough (“just take a regular slider and add another one”), but there are some unique challenges. For one thing, a range slider needs to prevent the high value to be less than the low value and vice versa. For instance, if the low value is ’40’, you should not be able to drag the high-value slider to a position that is less than that, let’s say ’25’. Also, both sliders should be set up so that they always keep a minimum distance and can’t be dragged on top of each other.

Based on a simple slider setup (shown at the top of the screen), I created the second slider element and then descended into ‘trigger madness’ to create the range slider functionality. I ended up with two dozen draggable objects and several hundred triggers. In hindsight, it may have been easier to use a JavaScript-based slider (like these JQuery sliders) and display it as a webobject inside Storyline.

Once the range slider was completed, I wanted to try out two more slider variations: 1.) a dial that can be rotated and 2.) a vertical slider where the indicator is moved up and down by buttons. One challenge for the dial was to have the rotation stop once the highest value (in my example 400%) was reached and only allow rotation back to a lower value.

The dial too required dozens of drag objects and several hundred triggers. The good news was that even with that many elements and triggers on a single slide, Storyline did not buckle. Especially the range slider could have been improved with a bit more troubleshooting, but I had learned enough about the concepts involved and left it as ‘good enough’. In any case, slider interaction are a great alternative to the usual multiple choice, multiple response or drag-and-drop input types and the extra development effort is well worth it.

Here is the published example.

I have been researching hardware and software options for low-cost multi-rotor drones for a while, my inner-geek can’t wait to fly and program one soon. If I could only find the time! There I was on a Friday afternoon, waiting for an open source flight planning software to download, when I happened to see a tweet about Articulate’s weekly E-Learning Challenge: Interactive Screenshots for Online Training.

So I thought why not take one sample screen from the Mission Planner software and ‘bring it to life’. The Mission Planner (I still can’t believe this awesome software is free, open source!) software UI is very complex, with lots of dropdown lists, subwindows and parameter selections. For the E-Learning Challenge I picked one element; a flight planner window that allows the user to select a waypoint and then zoom in and out of a Google map display. I quickly set up a sample flight plan with six waypoints and captured the screen.

All the logic and objects are contained in a single screen, no additional layers or slides were used. Just like the actual software, the Storyline simulation allows a user to select any of the six waypoints and then use a slider to the right of the flight plan window to zoom in and out of a Google map. For example, if you select waypoint#3 and then use the slider, the map zooms to that specific waypoint. At least one waypoint has to be selected for the zoom slider to work.

Based  on the selected waypoint, different maps are displayed. The zoom effect was created with states of custom objects that are changed as the zoom slider is moved up and down the vertical scale.

I could have used hotspots, markers and captions to provide information about the flight plan window, but thought that using a zoom interaction would add more realism to the screen. I was thinking about making the Gauges panel on the left an interaction as well, but then I realized that I would need a connection to an actual drone to get input values for the various gauges. I might come back to this screen at some point and add more functionality.

Here is the finished sample. Can you guess which city my flight plan is for?

Edit 05/2018: I created a similar example in Adobe Captivate 2017, see here.